A Month of Math Software – April 2012

Welcome to the 16th Month of Math Software where I take a tour around the news and new releases in the world of mathematical software. Thanks so much to this month’s contributors without whom I would really struggle to put this newsletter together. As always, the archives can be found at http://www.walkingrandomly.com/?cat=47 and if you have any news for next month then there are numerous ways in which to contact me.

GPU Systems have released version 2.0 of their Libra SDK. According to the website ‘Libra is a cross processor, cross platform, cross language – standard math library and runtime API – for software application development.’ It supports both OpenCL and CUDA and multiple languages including C, C++, Java, C# and MATLAB.

Benchmarking the new Kepler GTX680 – AccelerEyes compares NVIDIA’s new hardware with its old. The benchmarks are Matrix-Matrix Multiply, Fast Fourier Transform and sorting.

Python

Version 0.7.3 of Pandas has been released. According to the website, Pandas aims to become the most powerful and flexible open source data analysis / manipulation tool available in any language Go to http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/dev/whatsnew.html to see what’s new.

Version 0.4 of mathics has been released. ‘Mathics is a free, general-purpose online computer algebra system featuring Mathematica-compatible syntax and functions.’ The Mathics project is looking for more developers, contact Jan Pöschko if you’re interested.

Sparse Linear Systems

PaStiX (http://pastix.gforge.inria.fr) is a scientific library that provides a high performance parallel solver for very large sparse linear systems based on direct methods and version 5.2 was released this month.

MATLAB add-ons

Version 2.1 of LAMG (Lean Algebraic Multigrid) was released this month. LAMG is a fast graph Laplacian solver. It can solve Ax=b in O(m) time and storage, where A is the graph Laplacian of a weighted undirected graph with m edges. Free MATLAB code download: http://code.google.com/p/lamg/

Version 4.2 of Chebfun is now available from http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/chebfun/.Chebfun is an open-source system written in Matlab that overloads Matlab’s operations for vectors and matrices to analogous operations for functions and operators. For an overview of what Chebfun can do, take a look at the collection of more than 100 Chebfun Examples posted at http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/chebfun/examples/